1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for dynamically balancing resources in a server farm.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
A server farm is a collection of computer servers and associated components. A typical server farm may be used to distribute processing workload amongst the servers in the server farm in order to expedite computational processing and use available resources more efficiently. A server farm may be organized into functional groups of servers performing similar data processing tasks. The resources available to each functional server group have traditionally been monitored by system administrators. When any one of the groups becomes overburdened, an upgrade is performed—usually by the system administrator buying one or more new servers and manually assigning them to the overburdened functional server group. System administrators often must plan each server group for the peak expected workload, resulting in inefficient utilization of server resources during non-peak workloads. Further inefficiencies result from the fact that workload is often unbalanced between functional server groups, meaning that the resources of one group may be substantially unutilized while another group is overburdened.